Horizon Federation-RentDueYesterday War

Horizon Federation-RentDueYesterday War
A Horizon Federation "lagfleet" sieges the Vega siege station DeepSpaceFuelDepot.
Date 6 October 2023 - 8 January 2024 (94 days) Location Server-wide Result Vega drops out of war on 7 December 2023 with white peace. RentDueYesterday dissolves and is replaced with the Andurian Federation on 8 January 2024. Horizon Federation formally dissolved on 5 February 2024.
Participants
Horizon Federation Arimfea Orovika Imperial Nova Cortesia Del Mar Amcar Shadow United Federation of Planets Sanctuary	RentDueYesterday Vega

The Horizon Federation-RentDueYesterday War was a major military conflict on Horizon's End, fought between the large pirating nation of RentDueYesterday and their ally Vega against the Horizon Federation coalition, at the end of 2023.

History

Prelude

Shadow-Orovika War

Main article: Shadow-Orovika War

Prior to the establishment of RentDueYesterday, several of the players who would go on to create it, including FellOffBridge, AdelieXY, and Noix444, fought for the nation of Shadow (then under the control of Ae0n) in a smaller conflict against Orovika.

This conflict, which lasted from 22 August to 29 September 2023, is widely considered to be a progenitor to the Horizon Federation-RentDueYesterday war, as it involved many of the same players fighting one another on the same sides as the Horizon Federation-RentDueYesterday War would. Several pirate players involved in the conflict (most notably FellOffBridge) transitioned seamlessly from fighting Orovika for Shadow to fighting Orovika (and others) for RentDueYesterday, even after peace was struck with Shadow on 29 September.

Arimfean Piracy

The nation of Arimfea has, under the leadership of several different governments, historically vacillated between permitting and not permitting piracy among its members - that is, allowing them to attack other players on the server apolitically. Under the leadership of Grand Vizier Vortexion, and especially following Arimfea's alignment with the privateer-dominated Alliance of Regulus in the Alliance of Regulus-Vega War, Arimfea had largely normalized its relations with other nations by September 2023, and presented itself as a respectable diplomatic player.

However, Arimfea at this time did not fully purge all pirates and piracy from its ranks. The players FellOffBridge and K9_Caper, both members of Arimfea, still engaged in occasional piracy and mercenary work, actions to which Arimfea largely turned a blind eye throughout September 2023. Publicly, Vortexion managed these contradicting aims via a delicate diplomatic balance. Privately, he justified these internal contradictions as a lesser of two evils: he reasoned that Arimfean pirate players like FellOffBridge, if forced to choose between Arimfea and piracy, would choose piracy over Arimfea; thus, by keeping Arimfea hospitable to these players, he could retain control over them and limit the damage they caused to the server.

On 7 October 2023, one day after the Horizon Federation was established, Vortexion said in the Horizon Federation discord,

"I hope you finally see what massive tidal wave of shit I was holding back."

Establishment of RentDueYesterday

The nation of RentDueYesterday was established on 20 September 2023 (while the Shadow-Orovika War was still ongoing) by FellOffBridge and K9_Caper. The following day, K9_Caper got cold feet, seceding and joining Imperial Nova instead; this left FellOffBridge in full control of RentDueYesterday.

RentDueYesterday quickly recruited other pirate players such as AdelieXY and BrooklynSupreme to their ranks, and began broadening the scope of their attacks (though they did not immediately target the entire server). In addition to fighting Orovika on behalf of Shadow, RentDueYesterday began attacking Imperial Nova, leading to the establishment of an informal anti-piracy alliance between Orovika and Imperial Nova on the evening of 29 September (a few hours after peace was struck between Orovika and Shadow).

Fortitude No-Fire Zone Rework

In the intervening week between the end of the Shadow-Orovika War and the start of the Horizon Federation-RentDueYesterday War, RentDueYesterday engaged in independent piracy against Orovikan and Novan targets, to which Orovika and Nova responded with fleet action.

A majority of these fights (as in most wars) occurred in Regulus. At this time, Arimfea maintained an absolute "no-fire zone" policy within the bounds of their space station Fortitude, located in northern-central Regulus (as Vortexion described it in June 2023, "violate the safezone and I violate your ships"). FellOffBridge in particular made extensive use of this policy to escape counter-attacks by Orovikan/Novan forces, which led to strong diplomatic pressure from Orovika and Imperial Nova on Arimfea to rework the rules of the Fortitude no-fire zone.

This issue came to a head in a battle on 4 October 2023. In a battle report in the Orovika discord, yodabird19 describes:

Fell piloted a gunship and started dogfighting me over Vask. When PepperedApple showed up to back me up, Fell fled into space and started cruise-dcing northwest. I pursued him while everybody else tried to jump in front of him, but he made it inside Fortitude's borders and everyone decided to pull off but Longy, who was quote "not gonna play his games". 
Longy sunk his unpiloted gunship inside Fortitude, and Fell (as anticipated) did his level best to get Vortexion to declare war. Vortexion publicly demanded a stack of chetherite blocks as reparations for damage incurred to the station's glass ceiling (Fell tried to fly into it) and for "violating the no-fire zone"; when Longy went to fortitude to fork over the reps, Fell shot him dead. Vortexion proclaimed, "oh my god this is such a clusterfuck", and presumably went to bed.

The following day, on 5 October, Vortexion posted a message in the Horizon's End #server-news channel entitled "FORTITUDE NO-FIRE ZONE REWORK". The message stated that "warships may not invoke the no-fire zone under any circumstances", and that "dragging ANY AND ALL kind of conflict to Fortitude...is considered a breach of the no-fire zone". This is broadly understood to be the moment at which Arimfea ended its strategic balancing act between its pirate and non-pirate interests, decisively putting its foot down against the actions of RentDueYesterday.

Conflict

yodabird19 describes to the Orovikan military the incident that started the war.